Over the last 6 months, we analyzed over 10,000 hours of meeting room usage across select customers. The main takeaway? Meeting rooms are not being used as designed, and it’s costing companies millions.
We highlight the numbers behind meeting room usage in our new Workplace Utilization Index: Mid-Year 2019. Wrong-sized offices are underutilized, costly, and detrimental to employee experience in the office.
Generated by Density’s people count sensor platform, here are some key observations:
- 36% of the time meeting rooms are in use, they’re occupied by only 1 person.
- Meetings with between 2 and 4 people represented 40% of all meetings.
- Large meetings were rare: 85% of meetings had fewer than seven attendees, and only 6% of meetings included more than 10 people.
- Even the meetings with the most attendees typically only utilized 45% of the room’s capacity.
Solving the problem of wrong-sized spaces will ultimately save companies millions of dollars both in the future and at the time of initial fit-out after buying a new property. However, the answer is not to simply shrink all meeting rooms.
Getting the right mix of space requires ongoing measurement of how your own employees use spaces at work. There’s no Golden Ratio for office design. The goal is to measure what employees actually need over time and adjust space allocation to respond to these needs as they change.
Get your free copy of the index here: Workplace Utilization Index: Mid-Year 2019